The following is a response to the following query....more...
The following documents some initial exploration into why, if, and how sentiment analysis might be added to the BIM module for Moodle. BIM is a tool that helps manage and mirror blog posts from individual student blogs. Sentiment analysis is an application of algorithms to identify the sentiment/emotions/polarity of a person/author through their writing and other artefacts. The theory is that sentiment analysis can alert a teacher if a student has written something that is deemed sad, worried, or confused; but also happy, confident etc....more...
The use of blogs in one of the courses I teach is now into it's fourth semester. Well past time to do explore how it's all going, evaluate some of the design decisions, and make some decisions about future developments. In preparation for that it's time to look at some of the extant literature to look at findings and methods. The following is the first such summary and is focused on @spalm et al's...more...
The very nice folk from my institution's ICT group warned me back in March that...more...
I have until the 21st of February to get BIM tested and ready for installation into the institutional Moodle instance. The following is some initial planning of what I'd like to get done in that time frame. A list that will then need to be further whittled away to what I can get done in that time frame. There are three categories of changes...more...
I am planning to do some more work on BIM in preparation for using it in teaching this year, including finishing some analysis of how the blogging went in last year's two offerings....more...
BIM is a Moodle activity module that I developed and use. BIM evolved from an earlier system called Blog Aggregation Management (BAM). BIM's acronym is BAM Into Moodle. As the name suggests, BIM is essentially a port of all of BAM's functionality into Moodle. Both BAM and BIM are designed to help with the task of managing students in a course writing and reflecting on their own individual web blogs. In particular, it was designed to do this for courses with hundreds of students....more...
Earlier this week @sthcrft asked https://twitter.com/sthcrft/status/397143586178756608...more...
The following is a long overdue attempt to identify and solve an issue with BIM....more...
The following post started over the weekend. I'm adding this little preface as a result of the wasted hours I spent yesterday battling badly designed systems and the subsequent stories I've heard from others today. One of those stories revolved around how the shortening available time and the poorly designed systems is driving one academic to make a change to her course that she knows is pedagogically inappropriate, but which is necessary due to the constraints of these systems....more...
Came across Perrotta et al (2013) in my morning random ramblings through my PLN and was particular struck by this...more...
The following is a summary and some thoughts on the following paper...more...
The following is a description of the kludge I put in place to mark the learning journals - see here for a description of initial thinking behind the journal - folk in the EDC3100 course this semester had to complete. It's meant to record what I did, provide some food for further development and offer an opportunity for some initial reflection....more...
After seeing a previous post sharing some of his visualisations of the links between blog posts of EDC3100 students, Nick provided some video showing how the links were made over time....more...
I have a problem. If I'm really lucky, BIM will get added to my institution's version of BIM for Semester 2 and I will be able to use it. Based on my experience this semester - where I've used an approach that depends on BIM - there has been limitations and workload issues. Having BIM installed in the "enterprise LMS" will help significantly reduce these problems. It will also severely limit my ability to learn....more...
What's good for research, must surely be good for teaching?...more...
I found out last week that the abstract I submitted to Moodlemoot AU 2013 had been accepted. The talk will attempt to outline what I'm hoping will be my primary line of research over the next couple of years, which is probably going to be something like...more...
The following is a mini-argument for and example of how the e-learning tools should be made more supportive. i.e. actually help the staff and students using them actively address common problems in a pro-active way. It continues some more thinking about an earlier question I asked, Does institutional e-learning have a TPACK problem?" and hopefully will inform the on-going research and development around BIM (now officially released to the Moodle community) and also inform the Moodlemoot'AU 2013 presentation I proposed....more...
The title for this post is (probably a slight re-phrasing) of something @palbion mentioned last week during a conversation about the low quality of information systems within higher education (or at least our experience thereof). The comment was in relation to the professional and academic staff who are struggling with the various information systems universities are increasingly using to support tasks such as managing research higher degree students form application through to graduation, managing the process of sending students out into industry for practicums, and of course the more general LMS and student records system....more...
The following is just a "diary entry" recording a bit more evidence for the story that our students are neither digital natives nor digitally literate. It may or may not become useful in future research/writing. It's not meant to be insightful, just a record of an experience....more...
Next step in the development of bim v2.0 is to start the process of submitting it to CONTRIB. i.e. essentially getting out officially into the Moodle community....more...
Have to give a 10 minute spiel to the USQ L&T Systems Advisory group soon to support a request to get BIM installed in the institutional Moodle instance. The slide set is below....more...
Another step in getting BIM 2.0 ready for release. Addressing the current two outstanding issues prior to exploration of submitting BIM to Moodle CONTRIB (??appropriate terminology)...more...
The third in a series of posts documenting necessary cleaning up of issues with BIM. Getting closer and closer to release of 2.0b...more...
Building on that last bit of issue cleanup this aims to reduce the list of open BIM issues a bit more. The focus in this part will be...more...
While BIM 2.0 is largely working there remains a list of 30 open issues to be addressed. 19 of these are "future" issues. i.e. changes that would be really nice but aren't necessary for the immediate release of BIM 2.0. The following is the first part of working on the 11 that are of immediate interest....more...
The following reports on the process to complete the backup/restore functionality for BIM 2.0. Backup is currently working. Time to add the ability to restore those backups. It draws on the process described in this documentation - "Restore 2.0 for developers". Which doesn't appear anywhere as detailed/sequential as the backup 2.0 documentation....more...
What follows is a journal of the attempt to bring BIM 2.0's backup functionality into line with the new approach in Moodle 2.x....more...
The next step in the development of BIM 2.0 is identifying the list of major (Moodle) requirements that need to be implemented. BIM is a Moodle activity module. Moodle has a range of expectations that such modules are meant to meet. The following is an attempt to identify what needs to be done....more...
After a short Xmas break it's time to continue work on getting BIM 2.0 up and going. In this post I'm trying to continue the work from a week or so ago. The main aim is to fix a bug with the manage marking page....more...
The following is essentially an activity log/diary or the first steps of getting back into work on BIM. I'm hoping to have it ready to work with some course redesign I'm working on, but timelines may make that difficult....more...
So the 2013 NetSpot Innovation Fund has been announced. You can read more on that prior link but my summary is that NetSpot will contribute their human resources (with significant expertise around Moodle development, QA etc.) to improving an existing innovation with the aim of making it more sustainable. In the words of the guidelines...more...
Earlier this year, as the assignments mounted with my Graduate Diploma of Learning and Teaching, I put the development of BIM on the back burner. As my study to become a teacher winds down (stops for good on November 11 at the end of a 6 week internship) I'm thinking of re-starting work on BIM. Before I do that, I'm have a couple of questions...more...
The purpose of this post is to make formal what many people have already assumed. Work on BIM and BIM for Moodle 2.0 is not really happening at the moment. I've already missed the "early 2011" release of BIM for Moodle 2 I was aiming for and have been incredibly slack in solving an issue with BIM for Moodle 1.9 and Yahoo Pipes....more...
Time to continue the implementation of support services for manage marking started in the last post. Services left to be implemented are...more...
As per the last post time to complete some support services for manage marking....more...
The next step in bim2 development is implementation of the manage marking tab....more...
The last work on bim2 ended up with the first 2 of 5 tabs for the coordinator interface completed. This post continues on with that development....more...
The last bit of work on bim2 set up the structure for the coordinator interface and operations. This post documents the work of implementing the models, i.e. starting the process by which the coordinator interface actually starts actually working. Most of this should be a reasonably straight translation/update of bim into the OO structure of bim2....more...
This tells the story of the conversion of the bim coordinator code into the new OO design being used for bim2....more...
The purpose of this post is to make concrete the status and future plans around bim2. The update of bim for Moodle 2.0....more...
The following continues the coding of the bim2 process for registering and processing a new student feed. It's taken a couple of weeks, but it is working with only a few minor tweaks and nudges remaining....more...
Apart from the many todos, the last post covering bim2 development left off at the task of registering a new student feed. Summarising/recording the development of bim2 to complete that task is the purpose of this post....more...
The following floats/records some initial ideas for connection two of my current projects, BIM and lak11. The ideas arise out of some discussion with my better half who is currently using BIM in one of the courses she is teaching....more...
The last post ended up with the basics of the student controller and views functioning to produce some simple output. The aim here is to get the entire student interface up and actually reading data from the database. It won't be completely finished. There will be some additional extra features to add. The aim here is to iron our the design of the whole model/view/controller set of classes....more...
I'm currently programming up bim2, a new version of BIM to work with Moodle 2.0. I'm wondering whether a version of BIM for Wordpress might be an idea....more...
bim2 now has a working controller structure, but it doesn't do anything. This post summarises initial attempts to implement the student controller so that it actually implements the state machine for the student interactions. It's also the first attempt to implement some models and views with the MVC structure for bim2. This is liable to raise a range of questions about design, testing and other tasks....more...
So, bim2 is up and going, at least in terms of being able to create an instance of the activity within a course. The trouble is that it can't do anything. This post starts the process of implementing the design of the user interactions with bim2. The intent is to go with a Model-View-Controller type structure in the hope that this will improve flexibility and reuse....more...
Okay, so after fixing up the naming problems with bim2 etc, it's time to actually get the code going....more...
The last post covered the initial steps in starting bim2. Including the choice of the name bim2. But there is a problem....more...
The following records some of the initial steps in actually coding bim2. It includes...more...
The main long term issue in the use of BIM has been student's creating blog posts that contain "special" characters. This is typically done when they create their post in Word and then copy and paste it into their blog. The interaction between BIM, SimplePie and database engines has not been a good one. It results in blog posts either not being stored in the Moodle database or being cut off at the special character....more...
This might seem like a bit of procrastination preventing progress on BIM 2.0, but it's part of the whole Moodle 2 familiarisation process and also checking out the work of a friend. What follows is an attempt to install the universite theme for Moodle 2 onto a local instance....more...
Continuing on with playing with Moodle 2.0 and in particular its external blog syncing and integration of SimplePie. The aim here is to test the problem with special characters in feeds and what it does to PostgreSQL databases....more...
As a first step to BIM v2.0 I'm installing and starting to play with Moodle 2.0 (RC2). The following is a summary/reflection of the experience. One of the aims of this is to investigate how Moodle 2.0 handles its integration with external blogs and see what lessons/insights I can learn for BIM v2.0....more...
The following is an attempt to summarise an attempt to understanding EduFeedr a bit more. Especially to compare and contrast it with BIM. I'm particularly interested in seeing what lessons can be learned from EduFeedr, not to mention what code and ideas can be borrowed....more...
I'm slowly getting out from under the thesis, which means I am starting to have some time to think about the next version of BIM. The following is an attempt to lay out some of the ideas I have for the next version of BIM. Beyond helping me gather my thoughts, I'm hoping it will generate some comments and ideas from others. I doubt I will be able to implement all of the suggestions, so I'm hoping to get a sense for what others think is most important....more...
The following explores some ideas for extensions to BIM based on a blog post from Dave Cormier....more...
Once I get out from under the PhD, I'm hoping to expand an initial idea attacking the rhetoric of blended learning currently in vogue in some parts of higher education. The purpose of this quote is to save a quote that I've just come across for that expansion, and also to summarise the idea....more...
The following draws together some work on distributed cognition in the Globe Theatre and some early thoughts on how that might be useful in improving the design of learning management systems such as Moodle (there's also an argument to be made about university teaching and learning, but I'll mostly leave that alone). While primarily focusing on helping teachers teach and thus improve the student learning experience, the ideas could equally be applied to learners (and probably have been)....more...
I'm slowly reading through How people learn and thinking about how it applies to my own practice and what I see within higher education. This post arises from this paragraph...more...
The following is a record of some work to investigate some more apparent problem with BIM mirroring blog posts that contain "special" characters due to a bit of copying and pasting from Word into Wordpress....more...
The following is a summary/explanation of a common problem with BIM and its mirroring of blog posts and a common solution. The problem is generally caused by folk creating their blog posts in Word and then copying and pasting them into the blog post. For various reasons this process brings along some "special" characters which, while they work fine in Word, screw up royally within more constrained textual representations, like those of Web browsers and XML/RSS parsing libraries....more...
In writing the last post, I had the opportunity re-read the Wikipedia article on wicked problems. This quote struck a chord with me...more...
This is the first post in a new tradition. Any problems folk report with BIM and the subsequent diagnosis and solution I undertake will get reported here on the blog and hopefully mirrored in some way onto the BIM github page....more...
Just uploaded a screencast/presentation that is essentially a cut down version of the presentation I gave at Moodlemoot'AU 2010 last week. There's an embedded version below or you can find the original on vimeo. There's also more information about BIM elsewhere and you can download BIM from here (for Moodle 1.9.x) or BIM for Moodle 2.x here (look for the "Zip" button)....more...
The following describes the process of adding support for the provision of OPML files to the Moodle activity module BIM....more...
The following details an attempt to use user/messageselect.php with BIM in an attempt to move towards implementing an email merge facility for BIM....more...
One of the issues I have to address with the BIM Moodle module is the provision of an email merge facility. I (and a couple of other people I know) haven't been able to find how to do this within Moodle. The following outlines one proposal for how this might be done within Moodle 1.9....more...
The following outlines steps to continue work on BIM's backup and restore functionality. As per this issue the user part of the back up has errors....more...
BIM is a Moodle activity module that helps academic staff manage the use of individual student blogs, where those blogs are hosted on the students' choice of blog service (e.g. Wordpress.com etc.). An in-built assumption/limitation in how BIM works is that each student's blog must be open to the world. If access to the blog is restricted, BIM can't mirror it....more...
The following is a record of the process of adding a "deleted" state for a blog post in BIM. This is in response to an issue that has arisen out of BIM usage at CQU....more...
During the last week I have been in Canberra for various events, including giving a presentation on BIM at University of Canberra. Somewhat surprisingly (as last I knew, he was in New Zealand), Leigh Blackall was in "audience" at the presentation, and as is Leigh's wont, he asked some serious questions. I was troubled by those questions and needed time to reflect on what an answer might be....more...
In a couple of weeks I'm off to Canberra to talk PhD, potential ALTC grants and promote the use of BIM. As part of the latter task, I'm giving a quick talk at the University of Canberra as part of their Stuff the works lunches. The title of the talk is "Reducing the aggravation of student blogging: The story of BIM"....more...
This documents a problem, and hopefully an initial solution, around the combination of technologies that is Moodle, an Oracle database, and content that is copy and pasted from Word....more...
The following is a presentation abstract that I've submitted to MoodleMoot AU'2010. It's based on some ideas and thoughts expressed here previously. In particular, the main focus on the paper will be showing that the reason most university e-learning/teaching is not that great, is not really the fault of the academics. Instead it will argue that there are a range of limits within the higher education environment that are mostly to blame....more...
The following is the extended presentation abstract I plan to submit to MoodleMoot AU 2010. The idea was to submit a paper, but time has run out. The recent blog posts (starting with this one) about the story of BIM provide some of the early reflection that will form the basis of the presentation. The challenges mentioned in those posts will be abstracted somewhat to generate a series of limitations....more...
Episode 3 of the story of BIM...more...
This is the second episode in the continuing story of BIM. This episode picks up the story late in the first half of 2006. The initial foray into using individual student blogs to encourage reflection and make student learning more visible was bumbling along. It was now time to think about what I'd be teaching the following term....more...
The following is a start of trying to capture the story of BAM and BIM. The aim is to use this as part of a case study for a paper for MoodleMoot'AU 2010....more...
Since about 1996 much of my research and development around e-learning has found "concrete" form in a system call Webfuse. First described in Jones and Buchanan (1996) Webfuse became an essential part of CQU's operations. The unkindest (and basically wrong) description of Webfuse is that it was a proprietary, single institution learning management system....more...
BIM is into it's 2nd week of being used at CQU (about 3/4 courses approaching 500 students) and there's also talk of it being used at another Australian university. It's time for a couple of reflections on early experience and also time to identify the source of a common problem....more...
Prior to BIM being installed and used at my current institution it had to be checked by folk at NetSpot. The following details what I've had to do in response to that....more...
It is with a significant sense of relief that I announce the release of version 1.0 alpha of BIM. You can see the code and what passes for documentation on this page. The main BIM page gives more background on the rationale and design of BIM....more...
Today is the day that BIM get's handed off to the folk of my institution's central IT division and from there onto Netspot who will be ensuring that it is "safe" for IT to install it on the institution's live Moodle instantiation. In preparation for the hand over, I've done one last test and identified some issues to fix. This post documents that work....more...
Today BIM was tested by an intelligent, but when it comes to BIM a clueless, user. I sat back and watched the assumptions and mistakes that were made because the system design was not well thought out enough or was missing some functionality. The following is a list of the ideas that arose from that session....more...
A few days ago Stephen Downes - a little unusually - made a sequence of comments/tweets on Twitter around the "sameness of meaning" and its impossibility. Since then I've had a number of experiences and discussions that suggest some of the problem associated with learning and teaching policy, process and structure within universities arises because too many people assume that there is sameness of meaning....more...
Currently testing BIM on the training/testing environment of my current institution. This is where I find all of the problems from the institution's non-vanilla implementation of Moodle....more...
BIM is essentially complete and about to go into user testing, however, initial testing suggests that an ability for staff to change the blog students have registered would be a significant benefit during the first couple of weeks. This post describes the design and implementation of this feature....more...
One of the bigger tasks left to do is to integrate BIM with the gradebook. Some initial exploration has been done, this post seeks to document the initial implementation....more...
Just about done with development of version 1.0 of the module. A couple of important, but hopefully straight forward tasks to do. One of these is adding the ability for BIM activities to be backed up and restored. That's the purpose of this post. The plan is to find out how it is meant to work and plan how it can be done for BIM....more...
The following is the start of a process for developing a paper that I plan to submit to Moodlemoot AU 2010 based on my recent experience in developing BIM. The plan is to:...more...
Continuing the tidying of BIM. This time the focus is on any and all steps necessary to get BIM ready to go up on a test server and have some real folk actually look and play with it. The structure of this will be based around users and actions. I'm going to do some of my own testing and then also add in anything that comes up from working with others....more...
The last tidy up of BIM resulted in some fairly major code changes as early design assumptions were over-turned in favour of more PHP/Moodle like approaches, not to mention general better design/structure. This tidy up turns to some of the more "housekeeping" types of tasks. This one seeks to ensure that BIM follows all of the security guidelines as suggested on the Moodle site...more...
Next step in tidying up is to clean up the checking, calculation and setting of the blog and feed URLs as students register their blogs....more...
Sorry, no insights into the title of the post. This is simply a test post that I'm using for bim development....more...
Some more tidying up of BIM to get it ready for release....more...
Apart from some playing around with the gradebook, the new development for BIM is complete. What is left to do is the various cleaning up, double checking, documentation and other tasks necessary to turn BIM from essentially functional to something reasonably okay to install. This is the first post describing that process. It and the following ones will essentially be working through the to do list....more...
Almost forgot to add this into BIM. BIM is used by staff to manage and mark feed/blog posts from students. Eventually, those marks have to be put into the Moodle gradebook so they can form part of the students final grade. This post summarises a search for information about how this can be done within Moodle and some design thinking about how to get it done in BIM....more...
I had sort of hoped that most of the new BIM development was finished. However, after a bit of research at the local institution it becomes obvious that I'll have to implement a marker allocation screen. Hopefully, it won't require that much work....more...
This post continues on from the manage marking work and describes the design/implementation of the view and release operations of manage marking. There are strong similarities in what both operations do and how they do it, so doing them in one....more...
We come to the main last collection of functionality required of BIM to be operation (a major tidy up is needed after this, but it's getting there). That last collection is currently going under the label "Manage Marking". It covers the functionality required by the teacher in charge of a course to manage the marking being done by other staff, this includes the following tasks:...more...
A central assumption in BIM is that student contributions to their feeds are, at least in some part, intended to respond to questions or activities that have been created to encourage reflection and other good stuff. This requires that the teaching staff using BIM have a mechanism for creating and changing the questions students will respond to. This post describes the initial implementation of this screen....more...
Increasingly BIM development is getting to the stage where the functionality for BIM's three different types of user (coordinator, markers and students) are just about complete. I've been using a very naive, probably misleading interpretation of Moodle's capabilities system to distinguish between the different types of users and what they can do. Yesterday, doing what I thought was some minor updates, it broke. I'm currently having to use a kludge to get BIM to work for different users. This post is documents my attempts to fix this problem....more...
This post is meant to document the (hopefully short) process of getting the Mark Post screen implemented in BIM....more...
BAM/BIM has initially been designed for use at CQU. In that time it has been used in 29 course offerings with 13 of those averaging around 200 students per offering. i.e. BAM/BIM is originally designed for large offerings and hence needs to provide support for the teaching staff in charge of those large offerings....more...
In the last bit of work on BIM I got the Allocate Posts page working. This created the issue of getting the navigation/bread crumbs trail work in a useful way. I made an initial start on that, this post tries to get it complete. It will also be an attempt to get the "tabbed" screen for the coordinator working....more...
The last bit of work I did on BIM continue the current trend of getting screens mostly working without some of the extra effort required for a production system. This is in part driven by my desire to become more familiar with differing aspects of Moodle development....more...
This post describes the initial implementation of show student posts screen. IT builds on the format/process used in the show student details screen....more...
This post documents the creation/completion of the BIM show details screen. This is used by staff to get a summary of their student details, whether they have registered their feed, made posts etc....more...
This post follows on from the last post in doing some minor improvements to the show student details screen in BIM. This includes:...more...
This is a plea for pointers, suggestions and direct assistance....more...
In the last bit of BIM work I'd successfully created some test data and laid out some rough plans for what is next....more...
The last bit of BIM work resulted in getting the show student details screen up and going, mostly. Any more of these screens will draw on, at least in part, other data from other tables. Time to get those populated. This will be done using data from BAM currently being used....more...
In the last post I'd gotten started having the show student details screen actually getting data from the database. One data source this screen needs is not in the database, it's in the RSS file from the student's blog that is mirrored on the Moodle site. This post talks about the process about how BIM will be saving, reading and using that RSS file in its operation....more...
This post summarises the work necessary to take the next step in BIM development. As summarised in the last post the plan is to implement the remaining screens roughly complete so that potential users can interact and give feedback. This included the need to start designing and populating remaining database tables....more...
So, getting back into BIM development. The last post reminded me where I'm up to. The following is an attempt to plan, implement and document some code. Am starting where I left off, with the registration process for students. As part of this process I am finally starting to use the to do list for what it was meant to be used for....more...
Today has been a fairly frustrating today with a mixture of organisational "stuff" and an increasing level of annoyance at the state of the public documentation around Moodle development slowing down BIM development. That state is essentially with stuff all over the place, no coherent path through it and regularly discrepancies between advice from different sources, or sometimes the same. But that's the nature of documentation and open source projects....more...
Last time I worked on BIM I got to know weblib.php enough to get the first canned Moodle page generated. The student details page which lets the student see what BIM knows about their blog contributions for the current course....more...
It's been a while since I last did some work on BIM, various other tasks getting in the way. The main mid-term KPI is the delivery of a working prototype of BIM working within Moodle. That's what I started in the last bit of work....more...
In the last bit of work I did on BIM, I got to the stage of having some initial working code for BIM module that allow someone to create a BIM activity and have that data saved to the database. The activity wouldn't do anything, but it's a start....more...